This talk draws on two projects from my body of work: my long term ethnographic work with app-based gig workers in urban India. How are informal and blue collar workers developing intimate understandings of quantification and algorithmic processing through their work on platforms? What can we understand by looking at their responses through media use, subversive data-based responses as well as their attempts at informing and leveraging internet legislation across countries? I offer vignettes from my work to draw a broad picture of worker responses and activism through and against technology. Subsequently I will offer a reading and discussion of the affordances and failures of internet legislation - not as eternally neutral and fair instruments but as class, caste and gender informed judgments that have implications for new forms of work and worker activism. Through this discussion, the talk invites audiences to ponder the intersection of data justice and labor justice across global contexts.
Dr Noopur Raval is currently a postdoctoral fellow in Computational Media at UC Santa Cruz. She received her PhD in Informatics from UC Irvine in 2020. She is an alumna of the Berkman-Klein Center, CTSP Berkeley and the AI Now Institute at New York University. Noopur is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work draws on historical and anthropological frameworks to make sense of the present and future of digital work, urban social relations and self-expression. She has studied issues of labor, technology, pleasure and identity in gig work in the past and most recently co-edited 'A New AI Lexicon' featuring critical global scholarship on AI. In her current role, she is also studying the politics of immigrant technologists and tech organizations in Silicon Valley. Outside academia, Noopur is training to be a glass blower and engages craft practices to teach about the global political economy of labor and consumption.
Website: www.noopur.xyz
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ISP